Honore de Balzac Quotes

Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.

Happiness is brief. It will not stay. God batters at its sails.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

As this world was not intended to be a state of any great satisfaction or high enjoyment, so neither was it intended to be a mere scene of unhappiness and sorrow.

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

We don't live in the Garden. We live far from Eden. Every life is full of heartaches. Every life, frankly, is unspeakably sad.

No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction.

It's very hard to be happy when you've lost.

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

How quick the old woe follows a little bliss!

HAPPY EVER AFTER is a concept I'll never believe in. I would be content to sample some little taste of happiness today, tonight, right now. Though I know without a doubt that tomorrow will come saturated with pain. Life is like that. At least my life. And honestly, I cant think of anyone whose life is any different. The price tag for joy is misery. [...]

We all know by theory that there is no permanent happiness in this life: But the weight of the precept is not felt in the same manner as when it is confirmed to us by a heavy calamity.

Happiness is a bull's-eye, awaiting arrows of pain.

It is selfishness which is the cause of most of our misery.

There is no Mystery so great as Misery.

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.

Trying to be happy in this world is greatest illusion.

Pleasures, riches, honor and joy are sure to have care, disgrace, adversity and affliction in their train. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. O the folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world.

I sighed. "What is life but fleeting moments of happiness strung together on necklace of despair?

Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.

Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.